“Players will do whatever it takes, no matter how tedious and game/fun-ruining it is, in order to make the greatest gains in efficiency or power. This is something we feel detracts from the game, so we aim to keep the most efficient ways fun instead of a grind.”

If players see the greatest gain in gold profits coming from the need to pick up most anything and return once their inventory is full to purge it for profit- then that is what they will do. Straight up.

White items will not be worth the inventory space. No one will pick them up. If people start picking them up we’ll reduce the meaningless amounts of gold they already sell for even further. We can address these things if they happen.

Being perfectly honest about the cauldron and cube, they were removed for very ‘designery’ reasons which makes it difficult to explain to people playing the game. Players want more freedom, more choice, almost limitlessly, but a game is defined by its limitations. It’s our job to define those limitations, and enforce them to create the type and feel of the game we’re attempting to produce. There are a lot of good reasons, such as breaking up combat, giving very solid and safe stopping points for groups (especially strangers), as well as ensuring players are staying acquainted with the town, its inhabitants, features, and what it offers.

A player may say, well that should be my choice, I should just be able to kill demons without a break for as long as I want. It’s our job to make those limitations for the betterment of the enjoyment of the game, even if it’s an intangible and almost psychological improvement that on the surface appears to be a nonsensical remove of freedom. I expect this response to further confuse and enrage, unfortunately.

In another related post, typical crafting recipe, if they can’t be salvaged, and sell for so little gold that they’re not worth picking up.

I don’t get the point now. Just to clutter up the screen with worthless drops we can’t do anything with? That makes finding other items exciting? I was always very excited when I found things other than whites, but it was also wonderful to have a reason to have them in the game. Does making them completely worthless really make finding other items more exciting?

Diablo is about loot explosions. We can’t realistically have loot explosions without a bunch of confetti and glitter that makes it all look exciting, but has no value except to make the explosions more satisfying. Gold still did this to a degree, but we were missing the “arrows and bolts” of yesteryear. White items were worth something and we really didn’t have any junk we could just throw out with no limit. Now we do.

Blizzard hasn’t commented on it, but they’ve either changed the ratio of return from salvaging, or greatly rebalanced all of the crafting costs. (Or both.) Currently in the beta, a typical crafting recipe is something like 11 Common Scraps and 4 Subtle Essence. More expensive rare crafts cost like 15 white/8 blue/3 yellow materials. This requires players to pick up and salvage most of the whites they find, since you need a lot more white materials than blue, and only need yellow for rare recipes. (There are no recipes that use orange mats in the beta, though you get them 1% of the time from blue salvaging and 5% from rare salvaging.)

With these big changes though, we’ll have far fewer white mats. Thus recipes need to cost fewer white, or else salvaging a blue item needs to pop 2 or 3 whites, rather than just 1 as in the current system. In the current patch, a player who salvages most everything that drops winds up with considerable surpluses of white mats, so it seems like the design is (was) meant to require salvaging every blue and at least half of the whites you find, to maintain the proper materials to cost ratio. If you don’t salvage most of the whites, then you wind up with a surplus of blues and not enough whites.

The real chokepoint in the current system are the yellow mats. They are supposed to spawn about 5% of the time from salvaging a blue, but but either I’ve had terrible luck or that 5% yellow is more like 1.5%. (You get a rare mat every time from salvaging a rare, but since those almost never drop, other than from the Skeleton King quest drop, you don’t have them to feed into the grinder.) My current Clvl 13 Wizard, who has done quite a few Leoric runs, salvaged every blue ever, and spent quite a few of them on crafting to pimp her out, had 4 rare mats and 6 orange over her entire career, with literally hundreds of blue mats. Thus she was only able to do one rare craft ever, while capable of doing hundreds of blue crafts.

That said, we don’t know how Blizzard means the system to work over the course of the game and into the end game. There are a lot of rare crafting recipes, but it’s quite possible that they mean those to be uncommon indulgences, and that players winding up with tons of white and blue mats, but only enough yellow/orange to try those recipes rarely, is a feature, not a bug. Or maybe it’s all due to the fact that (virtually) nothing drops rares in the early game, but we’ll see those much more commonly later on, leading to more yellow and orange mats.

Loot explosions won’t be exciting if 99% of the items in the explosion are absolutely worthless. At least they had some value before when you could salvage them. Now they’re just a complete waste of pixels. Personally I thought salvaging was a great system to make use of items that you would never equip in the first place.

Really? The concept of the loot explosions and nothing but worthlessness dropping on the constant is irritating. It’s like a sub-game where you have to sift through the crap to look for something worth your while. What a f-ing waste. They spoon feed us this crap and people like you praise them for it. You are a Blizz enabler.

Titan Quest had a nice feature where you could bind a key to show only items better than white and gray. I remember putting that key to the default ‘show all’ tab, so I never had to look at whites. In D2 they were just irritating, how many times I had to move my character to have that green item I spotted show on screen. Or how many times I picked quivers of arrows and rest of the white crap… It’s a stupid decision from Blizzard, but I’m getting used to it by now.

Yeah, all that’s missing is a red light to go on, so in the expansion they just need to add another red light to make you drool… the perfect game.

Seriously, just make salvaging whites 1/5 (or more, depending on drop %) as effective as salvaging the lowest magic items… so they’re not totally useless, but very inefficient so most people won’t bother…

so lootdrops with 100% usable items are exciting then? … ehm no. Even though you would have to pick up all the shit to salvage it which is definitly more boring than slaying some demons. Prizes for the recipes will be attached to the salavage level that is now in the game. What I also didnt like so much (perhaps that would have changed by playing the game) is the obviously overcrafting in the game. Just after finden some white crap you can make yourself a blue hat… wtf? ^^ 😉

Exactly. One of the biggest problems I had with TL and other “diablo clones” were the droprates. It’s hard to strike a good balance between getting crap, getting something worth picking up, and getting nothing at all.

TL, you had the equivalent of uniques and set items thrown at you left and right and it began to not feel really all that great or lucky to find a good item.

I think the core questions here would seem to be: 1) How often does Blizzard expect you to have to pick up items of a given type in order to craft stuff (whites in particular since all others will probably be picked up almost always until possibly very late in the game) and 2) how many materials of each type does Blizzard feel are right for crafting an item of a given quality? The frequency with which you have to pick each item type up drives how quickly your inventory fills and (with the changes) how often you need to return to town. Players will have to balance the costs in terms of time and effort to craft items with the rewards that salvaging provides to them (and with the changes, the costs just went up). In think that Blizzard needs to make the crafting process from picking up an item for salvaging purposes through to crafting an item rewarding enough that players will want to do it but not so rewarding that it has everyone is forced to spend a lot of time doing it to build a viable character. Crafting should be an option for players, but not their only option. Some of the changes they made certainly have a major effect on striking this balance which means they must have felt strongly about the recent changes given all the work that needs to go into rebalancing everything so that the changes have the desired benefits without causing additional drawbacks. After all, additional work = additional release delay.

“It’s our job to define those limitations” I got a limitation for you, get the game out in Q1 like you said you would.

Also what I don’t get in this whole thing is people would still go to town. It’s not like they had no reason. Here is a short list of the reasons

1) Quests – most of the quests involved an NPC from town. 2) Crafting – only place to craft was in town. 3) Skills – Most of the time changing (as well as looking at) skills is done at town. 4) RPing – The denizens of town often have things to say. Players that like hearing their stories would go to town.

[quote]White items will not be worth the inventory space. No one will pick them up. If people start picking them up we’ll reduce the meaningless amounts of gold they already sell for even further. [/quote]

Yeah. I don’t think they really understood the purpose of white items in D2, or what Diablo is about. It isn’t “loot explosions,” it’s the item hunt. They are different.

I really think they should figure out a way to put some kind of intrinsic value in everything that drops. In D2, yeah, 99.9% of white/grey drops were worthless, *but* good players still paid attention to them because it was possible to drop some very valuable white items:

– Some white items sold very well for gold, if you needed it – Obviously, you needed good greys for runewords… – … and whites for crafting and certain cube recipes – Ethereal merc weapons

Mixing up the system is a *good* idea. There shouldn’t be a straight line progression where orange > yellow > blue > white. There should be valuable stuff in all tiers if you know where to look. The obvious answer is to require a white of the desired item type as a component of each crafting recipe, and have the end result be based in part on the quality of this item.

and gold became a joke in D2. The only good thing about whites in D2 was the ability to socket them for runewords. I hated runewords though. (they would have been fine if there was a dropped item that gave recipes) With no Cube to salvage items, whites become a inventory killer. You just can’t do that.

One thought I did have with whites though was make them the starting piece needed to craft an item. So crafted broadsword would need a white sword. Though I shoot this idea down with the fact that blacksmiths make stuff from ore.

This was my point in a post yesterday with a Path of Exile mechanic – an Orb of Alchemy turns a white into a random blue. Of course an orb of alchemy is a pretty rare drop, but you still find yourself examining and holding on to whites from time to time.

Another PoE mechanic – if whites are useless in D3, then have a toggle in system settings to “Hide Whites”.

I’m really nervous that first-timers are hitting the mark while my old-besties (Blizzard) are slow on the uptake. I still have faith though.

This is very true, There SHOULD be valuable stuff in all tiers thus making the item hunt more interesting and varied. Finding a “+3bspear wand”, a “jeweler’s monarch of…”, or a “3skill coronet of magus” was a great reason to check certain low tier drops. I really hope that like in the previous game certain items that were once ignored will be later made desirable by patches/xpacs. Then those who ignored “White items will not be worth the inventory space. No one will pick them up.” will be the ones raking in the bobby bucks 😉

Hmmm… I haven’t played the beta or anything. but would a system like this work?

Say while in town, you select a recipe you want to craft, or queue up multiple recipes (in priority order) Then, as you’re out busting loot pinatas, the whites are automatically put into your Neph Cube (or whatever equivalent), broken down, and the mats sent back to town and applied to the recipes you have queued.

The catch being, you eventually have to go back to town to pick up the completed item. I think this might get people into town without having to rebalance the whole salvage ratios.

i think it’s safe to say that everyone here liked D2. in D2 did you pick up ever single white item that dropped? even before LoD and charms were introduced i’d only pick up white items that i knew would sell for near the max amount.

i honestly don’t see this being any different. i did like the idea of the CoJ and the NC but if we’re only picking up blues and our inventory is bigger than in D2 i don’t think trips to town will happen more than every 10-15 minutes on average. you might have some amazing run where everything you kill drops a blue or better and 5 minutes later you’re back in town but i doubt it will happen often.

as far as crafting goes and how not being able to salvage white items goes we’ll just have to wait till next week when people can test it out to see how it balances.

It was nice that whites weren’t just “filler” in D2, even if they were the least valuable. Not only could body armors and certain other items sell for a nice profit (gold wasn’t quite as useless as people seem to shout), but many white items were valuable for the purpose of socketing. Some excellent runewords, like (ironically enough) White, required picking up and checking (or checking trader windows) hundreds of whites.

I picked up every item except for arrows/bolts. And because of that, I could gamble a lot and actually got some nice rares out of it fairly often. While there is no gambling in Diablo 3, I will still probably pick up all the whites as gold will supposedly be valuable as a general currency now and every little bit will help when trying to find affordable items on the AH. Removing the Cube and Cauldron will just punish people like me that like to squeeze every ounce of worth they can out of their drops.

If I suggested that every time we kill a monster, the game should display 2-3 random words that don’t have anything to do with the game, you think it was ridiculous and accuse me of being facetious. But that’s exactly what they’re doing. In fact, they’re saying if people perceive any sort of value at all — if they so much as pick up the items — they’ll make them even more worthless. This just seems moronic to me.

I get that D2 had mostly worthless white items too, but a) they were [i]mostly[/i] worthless not completely worthless and if they aren’t completely worthless, we’ll fix it. b) that wasn’t really one of D2’s better features. Isn’t D3 supposed to represent progress, not taking all the worst parts of D2 and making sure we keep them for the sake of nostalgia?

There were other, better ways of breaking up the action, as Eliminator stated. Also, they could have “nerfed” the Cube/Cauldron and white items all at the same time.

1) For some of the random events/quests (especially long, complicated ones) you have to go back to town to get your reward.

2) Act structure where there are a lot “dead ends.” In the Beta, you go linearly to the Cathedral, save Cain, but then the next part you have to go through is attached to New Tristram. The town is an actual hub, b/c there are many paths (usually gated by the story) that originate there. Think D2, Act 2 instead of the other acts (which were very linear). In Act 2 (assuming you went in order of the quest log), you would go in the sewers, kill Rad, then come back to town before going off looking for the Cube, Staff, and Amulet. Then you’d come back to town to go through the basement/Arcane Sanctuary. In D3, they can break things up like this, probably more so, if they design the hubs correctly.

3) Regarding the Cube/Cauldron. Put a “convenience tax” on them. Cauldron you only get 50% or less of the gold as you would if you sold it in town. Cube, if you “use the cube near an Altar” (basically, in town), you gain a better chance of getting stuff.

4) Similar to above, if you use the Cube on white stuff, there is a chance you get nothing. “The equipment is vaporized into useless dust and ash.” If you use the Cube out in the field on white stuff, there is a great chance to get nothing. If you use the Cube on blue stuff out in the field, there is a chance you won’t get the blue essence stuff, etc. For the best salvage (rares and legendaries), you’d probably never want to risk it out in the field.

Basically, they could have worked w/in the system they had set up. They didn’t have to completely scrap what they had. Same goes for the stats. There were better, more clever ways to diversify gear between classes, to create “bad” items to help boost the value of good items, to prevent gold/craft inflation. But instead they scrapped a great foundation and regressed. And to boot, they added clear flaws (mixing defense and offense in one stat, especially great defense, is very, very bad).

“White items will not be worth the inventory space. No one will pick them up. If people start picking them up we’ll reduce the meaningless amounts of gold they already sell for even further. We can address these things if they happen.”

WTF? I don’t really care, either way, but what ever happened to, “It’s your money, play the way you want”? Now it seems more, “If we find you doing something that we don’t envision as “fun”, we will stop you”. What’s wrong with these people?

“A player may say, well that should be my choice, I should just be able to kill demons without a break for as long as I want. It’s our job to make those limitations for the betterment of the enjoyment of the game, even if it’s an intangible and almost psychological improvement that on the surface appears to be a nonsensical remove of freedom. I expect this response to further confuse and enrage, unfortunately.”

They already addressed *exactly* what you just raged about. Game design is a heck of a lot more than “let the player do whatever they want wheeeeee!”

Oh, yes, how very “exact”. Make a blanket statement about game design, and use it as cover for all the crappy decisions and outright reversals of philosophy from here on out. Open wide now, and let daddy Bish spoon feed you some more crap. Also, I would note, interesting how your definition of “rage” includes “I really don’t care, either way”. I really gotta learn to relax in life, I guess 😛

Skyrim was a rather poor example to use ; it is FULL of limits thinly veiled by the appearance of an open world. Diablo gameplay, contrary to what you think, really does need limits. I’ve been saying it since the beginning, and I’m glad someone from Blizzard finally said the same thing — not that it really helps people that already have their minds made, though.

This one is very, very dumb. All that’s needed is a meaningful way to upgrade white items. I had long assumed that this was part of the point of enchanting but that’s gone. If white items (or much of anything else) are going to be aggressively, purposefully useless, then it shouldn’t be in the game. Ugh. There reasons are such BS…

TBH I am happy that White items will not be salvagable, but making them absolutely worth nothing saddens me.

I remember, especially in d2 classic, I would love seeing “end-game” (ie chaos sanctuary) white items drop, especially bone wands, war scepters/staves, and high-armor chest-pieces. These would sell for max gold to vendors and would make a nice way to get some extra cash for repairs/gambling.

This reasoning here from Blizzard just doesn’t make sense. Its complete bullshit.

The comparison to D2 white items isn’t valid at all. White armor items sold for a ton of gold. In late game, Many white items were worth far more than any unique item, due to runewords.

“Diablo is about loot explosions.” What the hell? Are you serious? Have you ever played a diablo game? Its not about loot explosions. Its about loot. There is a very big difference. Cluttering my screen with useless pixels is not good game design. Its poor game design because you have no f*ing idea what to do.

These tweaks change absolutely nothing and actually reinforce the strategy I’ve been using since the FnF build. Farm nothing but gold and buy inventories full of the cheapest infinite supply items the vendors sell to you (They even sell rares).

Before, I used to salvage every white that sold for less than 25 gold and vendored everything that sold above 25 gold. Now I will just vendor every single white, which greatly simplifies things for me. Their answer about lowering the price of vendored whites if people start preferring that, is truly asinine though. Are they really this clueless about the type of no life losers that will be playing this game? Do not get offended because you know it is true. There are people today who define their existence by their meaningless video game achievements. The fact that they introduced real world money encourages this behavior even further. Oh and the “designery” reason for these changes are squarely due to consoles. He’s just skirting away from saying it because he’s been well trained by PR.

I think the best way to solve this issue is to have a system where you can upgrade (for a fee) your white into better item, with some relativly small chance, like maybe 5% or 10% or 15% of it becoming magic item with completly random affixes and mods. If that fails, it becomes different white item with newly chosen affixes and mods.

Oh how short memories do you guys have. Have you forgotten about the D2 ACT 1 quest “Tools of the trade”? It did exactly what you describe. The reward for returning the Horadric Malus to Charsi was getting a white item imbued into a rare and there was also the horadric cube recipe where you could reroll all kinds of rares (amulets, boots, gloves, weapons, etc).

This dev team seems so intent in burying everything D2 did, but they end up returning to it anyways like we’ve just seen with character attributes.

Also about this: “White items were worth something and we really didn’t have any junk we could just throw out with no limit. Now we do.”

Their player base is telling them straight up that we can see right through the gimmick of throwing worthless items at us, yet they stubbornly stick to it saying it will be cool just because they say it will. Is it possible to be this dense and out of touch?

wow. all this rage against white items. D1 had them. D2 had them. Pretty much every ARPG game I have ever played has them. Can’t think of one that didn’t. I think the term “explosion” is stupid but I do enjoy watching loot (even worthless loot) drop from monsters. I have no problem with this whatsoever. It isn’t even about nostalgia. It’s about it being something that is a core of every loot game. Having something drop is what creates the item hunt. Ooh a drop…damn just a white…ooh a drop..damn just a green. You have to have worthless stuff or the good stuff isn’t as exciting. Just like too much good stuff is less exciting. (hellgate…that game I felt like I was replacing my items so often I never got a chance to love one) Torchlight’s loot was pretty awful too. Too many decent drops can spoil the effect of finding awesome ones. D1 and D2 did this so well. No one has done it as well since.

Having an entire class of items that no one is going to pick up anyway? Comparing it to D2, it would be like your screen constantly filling up with Arrows and Bolts. It’s useless pixels on your screen. Its poor game design.

I’m really disappointed in the attitude Blizzard is showing when it comes to making white items completely worthless. I think several people have touched on the varying usefulness/value they had in D2. I didn’t mind at all looking through the tons of white drops in D2 because there was a chance (small as it may have been) that something really great or exciting would drop. Sure, lots of people just ignored them, but if you knew what you were looking for it could be an exciting find.

Going back to D2 as an example, how many of you enjoyed picking up bolts or fulminating potions? Imagine a screen full of stamina potions and arrows. Excited? Didn’t think so.

Sure, the game is about loot, but just a bunch of filler for a nice glittery explosion is really something I could care less about (a nice bloody one is good enough for me). I think white items should have a diversity of value rather than forced to be a completely useless category.

The way he explains white items just makes them seem more boring than they should be imo. In D2 you know that white items could have been a magical, rare, unique or set item if you just had a little more MF gear or got a lucky roll. In D2 I get excited when I see white items where the unique or set version of it is good, because I know I was just a lucky roll away from getting it.

I don’t know how drops will work for D3 but it sounds to me like white items don’t have any potential of being something better with a lucky roll, if that’s the case then they’re just boring imo. Loot explosions of useless items may add some fun for certain people but a loot explosion where every item has the potential to be something atleast useful with a lucky roll adds so much more fun.

Runewords also added value to many white items and especially superior ones in D2LOD which made you constantly check white drops, if they had any runeword potential as they were or after adding sockets to them if they were unsocketed.

People seem to be viewing this incorrectly as a punishment to players – more work for fewer rewards. What this really does is both increase the intrinsic value of the items you pick up, as well as clarify the division between ‘action time’ and downtime (town-time).

Rather than picking up every single item that drops, and pausing every couple minutes to salvage and repeat, you now can just keep blowing up monsters until that fantastically colored item appears. Party members will then keep at it until someone needs to TP, without worrying that theres always SOMEONE salvaging and not helping out.

This also has the bonus of cutting down hugely on gold/item inflation – if people are getting gold out of everything, or tripling the magic/rare rate due to crafting, those items will plummet in value even faster. The success of the auction house entirely depends on gold/items having value – which won’t happen if the market is completely flooded with amazing stuff or millions of gold right out of the gate. Cutting down on pickups adds to your fun in game, and increases the value of your items to compensate for getting less items total.

As for not removing the white items altogether – I know many people disagree, but loot explosions really ARE fun. Almost everyone on this site has fond memories of seeing that special golden shimmer buried under a sea of cow corpses and trashy armors – which just wouldn’t feel the same if only the 5 blue+ items had dropped instead of 500.

Plus, keep in mind that likely white items won’t be TOTALLY worthless, but simply inefficient to pick up and bring back to sell every few minutes – the same as they were in D2. People may have enjoyed selling whites for a lot of gold, but this just made gold worthless – hence the fallback to a barter economy. Finally, the unspoken reason – given the history of blizzard games, inevitably farm-bots will arise that kill, pick up, salvage, sell – rinse and repeat. Adding extra steps to program around and keep them from being completely efficient market flooding monsters will help preserve the economy as long as possible.

TLDR; The customer is not always right, especially when they haven’t actually played the full version of the final product. While we *all* hate the delays, especially when they seem like reverse progress, at least give some thought to the reasons behind changes like these before QQ explosions outnumber loot explosions.

The Beta’s “item vacuuming” was very superficial. You picked up EVERYTHING that dropped, and once every ten minutes, opened your inventory and mass-salvaged it all. Completely brainless.

Glad to hear that we won’t be encouraged to pick up EVERYTHING now. Psychologically it makes a big difference in gameplay to see a gold item buried in a pile of white. In the Beta, it’s usually underwhelming when a chest or boss pops.

I would like to see some sort of value attached to some white items. The Diablo 2 system was nice. You never needed to pick up a white cap past level 1, but white plate armor would sell pretty well. White staffs with +skills were worth picking up for the gold value, and sometimes you wanted a particular item for a rune word.

I’m confident that, by release, there will be at least some of that, despite how literally we choose to read into what Bashiok is saying here. Again, part of the iteration process …

Why not just implement ethereal items again? Maybe let some high-level gem add +indestructible. I am kind of disappointed at Blizzard, not because of them cutting white/normal value but for totally dismissing the fact that whites/normals had a very interesting system in D2. Heck, why not even introduce staffmods again?

etheral was the worst crap ever and only useful with +indestructible (thus making the whole item class redundant) or as a gift for the merc. Etheral items were even worse than the idea of +magic find sorcs.

In Jay’s world either a player has to be encouraged to pick up everything to salvage/sell every 2.5 minutes, or every white item has to be made worthless such that the player is discouraged to ever pick one up. Unbelievable that he’s at the head of a game that revolves around the balance of item drops and the item hunt.

Seriously? If white items are going to be relegated to the worthlessness of arrows and bolts of D2, then what’s the point of having the white items in D3? I agree white items should not sell for much gold or be salvageable. But the white items must have value. You have a system for making the white items valuable. It’s called Crafting. Every crafting recipe should require a base white item, period. A crafting recipe for a short sword should require you to find/acquire a white (base) short sword. So although a short sword would be worthless in and of itself you’d still want to keep an eye out, especially for higher quality ones, or are you not going to have cracked, crude, damaged, normal, superior versions of each base item? Along the same lines, you could need whites to complete quests such as D2’s “Tools of the Trade” where you have to find the Horadric Malus, after which Charsi will imbue a base white item. Or are you not going to have quests like these either?

I just don’t understand the silly decisions you are making, especially when D2 is providing you all the necessary templates to make D3 awesome. How hard is it to take what you have and make it better? Obviously too hard for the people in charge of producing the game. Sheesh.